Utne Reader Film Reviews: July-August 2008

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Full Battle Rattle
(Market Road/Mile End; in theaters)
If it looks like Iraq, sounds like Iraq, and bleeds like Iraq, is it Iraq? Set in the U.S. Army’s war simulations in California’s Mojave Desert, the wry, provocative documentary Full Battle Rattle reveals just as much about America’s mislaid plans as any on-the-ground report from Baghdad. In following an Army combat brigade’s naive attempts to reconstruct and pacify a fake Iraqi village (complete with Iraqi Americans “acting” as Iraqi citizens), filmmakers Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss play a skillful hand: evoking the war’s horrors and humiliations through the absurdity of stagecraft. The bloody, eviscerated limbs of mannequin props, for example, powerfully suggest the wounded bodies that are banned from the network news. More Catch-22 than No End in Sight, Full Battle Rattle proves not only that truth is stranger than fiction, but also that the two are sometimes impossible to tell apart. —Anthony Kaufman

Musical Brotherhoods from the Trans-Saharan Highway
(Sublime Frequencies; on DVD)
Like most Sublime Frequencies releases, Musical Brotherhoods has almost no exposition. There are no voice-overs or superimposed maps explaining what to learn. Scrolling text sets the scene, and you’re hurled from the Moroccan coast to the ancient market of Jemaa Al Fna, an outpost of the trans-Saharan trade route. Goods attract crowds, and crowds attract artists, sorcerers, monkey handlers, and other wielders of spectacle. When night falls, musicians wheel out speakers and lights powered by car batteries and sear eardrums with punishing picking patterns on electric ouds, banjos, and mandolins. Onlookers clap and sing along, changing rhythms and melodies in unison and helping to build the ecstatic aesthetic of some of the world’s greatest street music. —Ty Otis

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
(Polari Pictures; in theaters)
What happens when a young, gay cellist from Iowa drifts to San Francisco, circa 1970? He begins an artistic odyssey in which he hooks up with people like Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, and David Byrne—and compared to them he is a strange, adventurous, and driven experimentalist. Or anyway, that’s the story on Arthur Russell, who died in 1992 but whose music is enjoying a resurgence. He played innovative contemporary music with the likes of Glass, then veered into rock ’n’ roll, became a disco superstar, and finally retreated into a bedroom studio where he perfected solo “echo music.” The tender and appreciative documentary Wild Combination blends honest interviews with ample musical interludes. In the end, it’s hard to tell if Russell was a troubled genius, or just troubled. —Joseph Hart

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